


deep-wounded mind

by procrastinatingbookworm



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Dreamsharing, Gen, Intersex Achilles, M/M, Macro/Micro, Mind Rape, Nereids (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Rape, Rape Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 15:47:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30041031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procrastinatingbookworm/pseuds/procrastinatingbookworm
Summary: Ares takes advantage of the improved communication between Olympus and the Underworld. Achilles suffers for his whims.
Relationships: Achilles & Hypnos (Hades Video Game), Achilles/Ares (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 40





	deep-wounded mind

**Author's Note:**

> Achilles is intersex, his genitalia are referred to as a cock and a slit.

Achilles was fleeing.

He didn’t know from what, or where he was, or where he was going. He just had to get away.

He was alone. He could hear fighting in the distance, and a low, repeated pounding, like war-drums, but he was alone, with just the trees and the hard-packed earth and his own sharp, terrified breaths.

He had to get away.

At some point, he’d transformed—his ears stretching into fins, gills opening on his throat and between his ribs, fluttering against the dry air.

His feet hurt. They were meant for swimming in this form, not running. His toes were long and webbed and thin-boned, each impact of them against the hard ground a painful one.

Exhaustion robbed him of everything but bare sensations—his tattered chiton flapping against his shins, a stitch in his ribs, the acrid scent of his own fear, desperate breathlessness, pain. 

Achilles kept running.

He ached down to his very bones. He desperately wanted to find the sea so he could curl up and hide in a tide pool. He had to keep running

He didn’t even know what he was running from. Just that he had to get away.

Everything hurt. His lungs, his gills, his feet. His chest, his throat, his teeth. 

He was almost grateful when he was seized from behind. He kicked and fought it for all he was worth, of course, but at least he wouldn’t have to run anymore.

It wasn’t like he was going to escape, anyway. The hand that had grabbed him was the size of his torso. A god’s hand.

“Well, now,” Ares said. “What have we here?”

Of course it was Ares. Who else would it be? Achilles had only ever drawn the attention of war gods, and Athena had better things to do, now that Achilles was dead.

Achilles was dead. He was in the Underworld. He should've been out of Olympus’ reach.

“What trickery is this?” Achilles asked, around the fear driving his heart into his throat. “You can’t—I’m not—” he struggled, trying to kick free of the hand gripping him. “I belong to you no longer, Ares.”

Ares turned his hand over, so they were facing each other. He was leering down at Achilles, red eyes bright as twin fires. “No, you belong to Lord Hades now.” Ignoring Achilles’ attempts to fight him entirely, Ares lifted Achilles to his face, nostrils flaring as he inhaled. “You stink of him.”

Despite himself, Achilles flushed. He hadn’t gone to bed with Hades in a long time—not since Zagreus started his escape attempts.

Their trysts had been stilted, distinctly non-sober affairs, usually resulting in Achilles in a dress with his hair done up, pretending to be a different golden-haired child of a goddess—one that Hades had actual affection for.

Then it had stopped. They’d fought—over Hades’ treatment of Zagreus, what else?—and Achilles couldn’t bring himself to return to Hades’ bedroom after that.

Apparently, the ways in which Achilles had allowed himself to be used had stained him more than time could erase.

Ares’ grip tightened, thumb pressing down on Achilles’ sternum. He breathed in again, and the exhale that followed ruffled Achilles’ hair. “You smell of the Night, too. She’s laid her cloak over your shoulders. I almost couldn’t find you.”

Achilles couldn’t stop himself from shuddering.

Ares laughed. The sound was cacophonous, like dozens of voices at once, and _loud_ , making Achilles’ chest thrum with it. “Afraid of me?”

“You’re a god,” Achilles gritted out. “It would be foolish of me not to be.”

The bones of Achilles’ ribcage grated as Ares squeezed him. His gills fluttered desperately in the space between two fingers, sending shudders of pain through his sides.

They weren’t functional, his gills—at best, they let him dive slightly deeper than a mortal, at worst left him breathless on arid summer days. But when he had transformed, fully immersed in the shape of his mother, they made him ache for want of the water.

“I’ve never known you to be afraid,” Ares mused, casually shifting his grip on Achilles as though he weren’t nearly crushing bones with every movement. “Proud thing that you were, god-child.”

“I am still proud,” Achilles replied. He would never lose that, for all that he tried to reconstruct himself after his death as someone he could bear to live as. “But I am less of a fool than I was.”

Ares looked down at him, contemplatively, as if contemplating how best to hurt him. His teeth were bared—not quite a snarl, not quite a smile. 

His grip slackened, just slightly.

It was a trap. Achilles knew it was a trap. Ares may not have been a strategist like his sister, but he was clever in the way all fighting is clever. Even brutality cannot be totally mindless. 

He was being taunted. He had said that he was no longer a fool, and Ares was giving him a chance to prove it—to not fall for an obvious trap and attempt an escape that would certainly fail.

Achilles’ heart pounded in his throat, so hard it nearly made him sick. Ares was staring down at him, head cocked, white hair framing his face. A single one of the sharp leaves of his laurel was the size of Achilles’ arm.

Idly, Ares’ thumb drifted the length of Achilles’ chest, leaving his sternum and sliding down his stomach. Achilles’ chiton was already rucked up and in disarray. Ares’ hand was touching so much bare skin—

Achilles wrenched himself from Ares’ grip, landed on his feet, and _ran._

He made it two steps, lungs and limbs screaming in protest, before Ares caught him again, gripping him so tightly that Achilles felt his ribs crack-splinter- _snap_ under the pressure.

“I expected better,” Ares said, and the disappointment in his voice hurt worse than the broken ribs.

The fingernail sliding into Achilles’ gill-slit, though, was _exquisite_ in its agony.

Achilles screamed hoarsely, bit his lip near to bleeding, then screamed again.

Ares laughed and laughed and laughed.

With an ease that made the action seem disdainful, he tore off the tattered remains of Achilles’ chiton, tossing it aside.

His nail left Achilles’ gill, mercifully. Unmercifully, it slid across his cracked ribs, then down his stomach, making his muscles jump and his throat clench against the out-of-place urge to laugh.

“What have we here?” Ares asked, thumbing over Achilles’ cock, then tracing the thin line of his slit. “Such a fascinating creature you are. More sea-folk than some of Poseidon's spawn.”

Ares’ grip was too tight for Achilles to squirm. Too tight for him to do anything but kick fruitlessly at Ares’ finger prodding between his legs.

“Brat,” Ares said, lifting Achilles closer to his face, until he took up all of Achilles’ vision. “You’re barely worth the work, like this.”

His thumb dragged across Achilles’ slit, rubbing at him. The tip of his fingernail brushed Achilles’ cock, scraping the sensitive skin.

Achilles tried to scream, but he couldn’t get the air into his lungs. He kicked, but his heels only hit calloused flesh over unyielding bone.

He couldn’t get away. Ares was touching him, and Achilles couldn’t get away from him. He would be trapped here, until the god of brutal warfare had his feel of Achilles’ suffering, he was _trapped—_

“Hey!”

The rubbing halted.

“That’s just bad manners, you know, assaulting someone in their dreams like that. _Really_ bad manners. I’m going to have to ask you to leave. No, no, that sounds too much like a suggestion. Gosh, I haven’t done this in a while.”

Achilles twisted his head to the side. He could just see Hypnos over one of Ares’ knuckles, hovering in midair, looking the way he always did.

“What I mean to say is… get out,” Hypnos said. The air around him shimmered with raw power. “ _Now._ ”

Ares snarled, squeezing Achilles tighter, making his broken ribs grate. “What if I say no?”

There was a _pop_ of displaced air, and Ares was gone. The forest was gone. Achilles was alone with Hypnos somewhere like he’d imagined the tops of clouds to look like—soft and white beneath him, with a blue sky above.

“I am _so_ sorry,” Hypnos said, sounding so genuinely distraught that Achilles lifted his head and stared at him.

Hypnos was wringing his hands, face twisted in an expression that looked utterly foreign on his gentle face. “I should never have let that happen, I don’t get much time to check in on dreams between my work at the House but that’s not an excuse, I’m so sorry. I should have been watching more closely. He shouldn’t have gotten in like that.”

Achilles dragged in a breath. “That was real?”

“It was really Ares,” Hypnos said. “Communication between the Underworld and the Olympians is more open now. I should have remembered… I’m _really_ sorry.”

“It’s—” Achilles hugged his knees to his chest. He was clothed again, in the long chiton he wore at the House of Hades, but he still felt bare. “It’s not your fault.”

Hypnos hovered closer, tentatively, then with intent. He slung his cloak off his shoulders and draped it over Achilles, tucking it around him. It was heavy and warm and _soft_ against his skin.

“Maybe it’s not my _fault_ ,” Hypnos said, settling next to Achilles, out of arm’s reach but still close. “But I shouldn’t have let it happen. I should’ve been paying attention. Dreams are my job.”

Achilles pressed his face into the lining of Hypnos’ cloak. It was so soft, it felt wrong to be touching it. His hands were too rough, his face too worn. He didn’t deserve something like this.

“I’m sorry,” Achilles found himself saying.

Hypnos sighed heavily. Achilles could hear him shifting his weight, moving closer. “If it makes you feel better to say that, go for it. But you don’t have to be. It’s not your fault.”

Achilles tried to speak and lost the words. He couldn’t even dig up the apology.

He was shaking, he acknowledged distantly, as if watching himself from afar. Shaking, crying. 

“Stay here as long as you need,” Hypnos said, with a gentleness that broke Achilles’ heart. “I’ll keep you safe.”

It was a promise that had been made to him before. That he’d made before. It had never been true.

Maybe this time, it would be.


End file.
